Canon of Scripture

“ But who can fail to be aware that the sacred canon of Scripture, both of the Old and New Testament, is confined within its own limits, and that it stands so absolutely in a superior position to all later letters of the bishops, that about it we can hold no manner of doubt or disputation whether what is confessedly contained in it is right and true ”

“ Then the body of men and women worshipping in any one place was subject neither to its own officers, nor to the Church at large; nor to the Scriptures of the Old or the New Testament. No man on earth, no organization, no book was master of the Soul. Each Church made out its canon of Scripture as well as it could. [2] Some of our canonical writings were excluded, and apocryphal writings used in their stead. Indeed, respecting this matter of Scripture, there has never been a uniform canon among all Christians. ”

“ But as there is no miraculous expounder of the miracul ous revelation, every man may and must interpret the Bible for himself. This is the weak part of this Ecclesiastical Institution considered as a finality: Each man has the right of private judgment, to determine the canon—what is Scripture; and the interpretation—what Scripture means. There may be individuality of opinion in religion as elsewhere. Within the lids of the Bible there is room for speculation. ”

“ The three following relate to the canon of the Scripture. The eighth article declares a belief in the Apostles', Nicene, and Athanasian creeds. The ninth and following articles contain the doctrine of original sin, of justification by faith alone, of predestination, &c. The nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first declare the Church to be the assembly of the faithful; that it can decide nothing except by the Scriptures. The twenty-second rejects the doctrine of purgatory, indulgences, the adoration of images, and the invocation of saints. ”

“ Thus much thought I to speak of the old Testament, wherein Almighty God openeth unto us his mighty power, his wisdom, his loving mercy and righteousness: for the which cause it ought of no man to be abhorred, despised, or lightly regarded, as though it were an old scripture that nothing belonged unto us, or that now were to be refused. ”

“ In His word, God has committed to men the knowledge necessary for salvation. The Holy Scriptures are to be accepted as an authoritative, infallible revelation of His will. They are the standard of character, the revealer of doctrines, and the test of experience. “Every scripture inspired of God is also profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, for instruction which is in righteousness; that the man of God may be complete, furnished completely unto every good work.” ”

“ The first argument to prove that no canonical book has been lost, is derived from the watchful care of providence over the sacred Scriptures. Now, to suppose that a book written by the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, and intended to form a part of the canon, which is the rule of faith to the church, should be utterly and irrecoverably lost, is surely not very honourable to the wisdom of God, and in no way consonant with the ordinary method of his dispensations, in regard to his precious truth. ”

“ For all Christ's gospel of revelation that He has made of Himself to the world, is meant to influence, not only belief and feeling, but conduct and character as well. All the New Testament, in so far as it is a record of what Christ is, and thereby a declaration of what God is, is also for us an injunction as to what we ought to be. The whole Gospel is law, and the testimony is commandment, and we have to keep it, as well as to confess it. ”

“ Before any of the New Testament Scriptures existed, there were a great many Christians in Judaea, Samaria and the pagan world, for the Christian faith was not spread by the reading of the Scriptures, but by the living word and teaching of the apostles and their disciples, or, in other words, by the Church as a teacher. 2. If the infallible Church were not at hand to enlighten us, we could not know for certain what books belong to the inspired Scriptures, nor could we be sure that the Bible, as we have it, is complete and unfalsified. ”

“ If it may be concluded that our liturgy is not good because it is comprehended in the mass-book, or in the breviary, we must, by the same reason, infer, that our doctrine is unsound, because it is all to be found in the councils, and in the writings of the doctors of the Romish Church. But so the Lord’s Prayer, the Apostles’ Creed, and many sentences of Scripture which are used in that missal, or in that breviary, as also the doctrine of the Trinity, of the incarnation, passion, &c., which are comprehended in the councils, would all of them be but superstitions and heresies. ”

“ Conscience bow him to the earth; Affection keep silence when the priest uplifts the Bible. Man is subordinate to the apocryphal, ambiguous, imperfect, and often erroneous Scripture of the Word; the Word itself, as it comes straightway from the fountain of Truth, through Reason, Conscience, Affection, and the Soul, he must not have. It takes the Bible for God's statute-book; combines old Hebrew notions into a code of ethics; takes figures for fact; settles questions in Morals and Religion by texts of Scripture! It can justify anything out of the Bible. ”

“ If I am asked why I receive Scripture as the Word of God, and as the only perfect rule of faith and life, I answer with all the fathers of the Protestant Church, ‘Because the Bible is the only record of the redeeming love of God, because in the Bible alone I find God drawing near to man in Christ Jesus, and declaring to us in Him His will for our salvation. ”

“ The inspiration of the books of the Old Testament is everywhere assumed by our Lord and his apostles; for they argue from them as possessing divine authority. "What is written in the law?" "What saith the scripture?" "All things must be fulfilled which were written in the law of Moses, and in the prophets, and in the psalms concerning me;" "This scripture must needs have been fulfilled, which the Holy Ghost spake before concerning Judas;" ”

“ II. The Catholic Church expressly teaches that God is the author of the Holy Scriptures in a physical sense. That God may be the author of Scripture in a physical sense, and that Scripture may be the Word of God as issuing from Him, it is not enough that the Sacred Books should have been written under the merely negative influence and the merely external assistance of God, preventing error from creeping in; the Divine authorship implies a positive and interior influence upon the writer, which is expressed by the dogmatic term Inspiration. ”

“ III. The Fathers and the Schoolmen often insist upon the completeness and sufficiency of Holy Scripture, but they do so in the sense of the present section. The Bible clearly teaches the doctrine of the Teaching Apostolate, and this implicitly contains the whole of Revelation. Hence we may say that the Bible itself is complete and sufficient. Sometimes, however, the Fathers speak of the completeness of Scripture merely with regard to certain points of doctrine. ”

“ The Old Testament is full of the teaching—which is masked to ordinary readers, but is the same teaching as the New Testament is confessedly full of—of the necessity of faith as the one bond that binds men to God. ”

“ The third theory, which is a modification of the second, is that of essential inspiration, which distinguishes matters of doctrine and conduct as closely related to God’s purpose in the Scriptures from the remaining contents of the Scripture, and claims for the Bible only such inspiration as was necessary to secure accuracy in regard to these. The theology and the morality of the Bible are inspired, but not its history, science, philosophy. ”

“ The attempt which is often made to show that the New Testament writers have established, by their testimony, the Old Testament canon, as containing just those books which are in our Old Testament, and no more, is a most unwarrantable distortion of the facts. ”

“ They object to calling the scriptures the word of God, as being a name applied to Christ by the sacred writers themselves, though too often misunderstood by those who extol scripture above the immediate teaching of Christ's spirit in the heart ”

“ Reverent scholars have demonstrated our sacred literature to be a growth in obedience to simple laws natural and historical; they have shown how some books of the Old Testament were accepted as sacred, centuries before our era, and how others gradually gained sanctity, in some cases only fully acquiring it long after the establishment of the Christian Church. The same slow growth has also been shown in the New Testament canon. ”

“ The scripture proves its divine authority and original both to the wise and to the unwise: even to the unwise and least-thinking part of mankind, it is abundantly proved by the many incontestable miracles wrought by Moses and the prophets, Christ and his apostles, for the confirmation of its truths and laws: it would be an intolerable reproach to eternal Truth, to suppose this divine seal affixed to a lie. ”

“ These later books, says one, "have been delivered to us; they have their use and value, which is to be ascertained by a frank and reverent study of the texts themselves; but those who insist on placing them on the same footing of undisputed authority with the Law, the Prophets, and the Psalms, to which our Lord bears direct testimony, and so make the whole doctrine of the canon depend on its weakest part, sacrifice the true strength of the evidence on which the Old Testament is received by Christians." ”

“ Christianity is one thing, if the fourth Gospel, the Epistle to the Hebrews, the pastoral Epistles, and the Apocalypse are canonical and (by the hypothesis) infallibly true; and another thing, if they are not. As I have already said, whoso defines the canon defines the creed. ”

“ An inspired volume of Scripture, the New Testament, was also brought into existence, from the teachings of the inspired Apostles, in which the great fundamental truths of the Gospel were embodied and cast in a form that would be enduring, and to which men could appeal through all the ages to come, as an authoritative statement, not only of what Jesus said and what He did, but also a statement of what doctrines are to be believed ”

“ In a plain, weighty, nervous style, rising at times to rugged eloquence, he defends the Bible as the sole source of religious knowledge, and the Apostles' Creed as containing all that is necessary to salvation. ”

“ It might have been thought that authors, who flourished on the borders of apostolic times, knew more of the mind of the Spirit than others who appeared in succeeding ages; but the truths of Scripture, like the phenomena of the visible creation, are equally intelligible to all generations. ”

“ With the Old it accepts all Scripture given by inspiration as divine, and interprets Scripture by Scripture, but it holds in abeyance all biblical utterances which seem unreasonable, and rejects all which are in conflict with the nature of things or the course of Providence, and aims to understand and to corroborate the written word by the works of Nature; and it maintains that no portion of the Scripture can be a revelation of God to man except to the extent that it is understood and conforms to the laws of being. ”

“ One of the first and most important principle, insisted on by our theologians and the framers of our Confessions, is that a passage of Scripture is always to be taken in its natural, plain and literal sense, unless there is something in the text itself, or in the context, that clearly indicates that it is intended to convey a figurative sense. ”

“ The Christian receives the Scriptures from her, first, because it is by her testimony he is assured of the true canon, that they have God for their author, and that he is enabled to distinguish the real text from the inaccuracies that have, in the course of time, been introduced by the carelessness of copyists, as well as the unscrupulousness of heretics. ”